Article Reliability in the ISV development environment
By Insight UK / 20 Oct 2021 / Topics: Cloud
By Insight UK / 20 Oct 2021 / Topics: Cloud
Any self-respecting ISV these days opts for an agile way of working. That’s only logical. Software development involves many risks. The goal of an agile method like Scrum is to minimize risks by dividing the work into small, self-contained pieces that are built, executed, tested, and accepted in a limited period of 2-3 weeks. This way, you can continuously release new software and reduce your time-to-market. A must, in these turbulent times.
So far, so good. But to enable continuous integration and deployment, you need a reliable infrastructure. The question is whether your local server park can provide for that. Whether it can cope with the constant traffic of all those containers full of bits and binaries. It may seem you are in full control but are you really? If a local server goes down, you have to rush to the server room and fix it. Meantime, your development process is at a standstill. Downtime is the killer for agile development. To maximize the availability of your local development environment, you continuously have to invest in scaling, managing, and securing your server park.
When it comes to agile development, a large-scale cloud infrastructure offers far more reliability. If a server goes down, another will take over automatically. Your developers won’t even notice. They can completely focus on their development tasks, speed up production and explore new techniques and ways forward. Think of the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning or microservices in your software, which requires far more computing power than any local server has.
There are countless benefits of working in the cloud. Companies – your customers – that use your software solutions in their daily operations, will be grateful for the flexibility, scalability, or availability. They don’t have to worry about updates, patches, backups and disaster recovery. Since they can rely on the infrastructure of the cloud, they get more time to spend on their core business and make money.
The cloud brings even more valua for businesses that want to boost their productivity by automating processes and transform into data-driven organizations. Data storage and computing power are unlimited in the cloud. This enables companies to make optimal use of their data and gain valuable insights.
Some companies prefer or are obliged to maintain a degree of privacy and control for their code or data. In that case a hybrid solution is a good option. When you use the public cloud where possible and a private cloud where necessary, you get the best of both worlds: the cost efficiency and reliability of the public cloud, and exactly the security requirements you and your customers need in the private cloud.
How reliable is your development environment? How can you guarantee optimal availability to the end users of your product? We at Insight have been working with partners like you across Europe for many years, providing valuable time, knowledge and support in many (hybrid) cloud scenarios.
Contact one of our cloud specialists to find out how we can support you in optimizing your cloud costs in line with your business goals, whether you are designing your first workloads in the cloud or work entirely cloud-based.
This article is part of a series of articles based on Microsoft’s WAF (Well-Architected Framework), where you find much more helpful guidance. WAF improves the quality of workloads operating in the cloud by focusing on a set of common architecture principles, including cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability and security.
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